It’s amazing to think how far medical technology has progressed over the past century. Some people living in the UK will be able to remember when antibiotics did not exist. Nowadays we have decoded the human genome and have cancer drugs designed to target particular types of cell in the body. This scientific revolution has enabled people in the UK to live longer, healthier lives than before. And we haven’t stopped yet. How often have you opened a newspaper and read an article about another scientific breakthrough or the latest 'wonder drug'?
Yet sometimes in our excitement about the possibilities of these new drugs and treatments we forget to think about the practical problems of getting them to patients. In the UK each of us can use the NHS and many people have PMI to complement the cover available on the health service. But public and private alike will face huge challenges to meet the expectations of patients as more and more new drugs become available.
We have already seen this with the controversy over breast cancer drug Herceptin. Women have fought court battles with their local NHS trusts to secure access to this potentially life saving treatment. Patients rightly expect access to the latest and best treatment for their condition. However, Herceptin costs up to £20,000 for a course of treatment and in November 2006 is was reported that the NHS deficit for this year is likely to be over £1bn (1). Insurers are not immune to these cost pressures either – in some cases cancer claims can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds (2).
What we need is a proper public debate about how best to make sure that patients have access to the treatment they need. It is not enough simply to say that 'government money' must be made available to pay for these new drugs. After all, 'government money' comes out of all our pay packets! People need to be more aware about the potential challenges to limited public health resources - Standard Life Healthcare's research shows that people consistently underestimate the costs of healthcare (3).
It's urgent that this debate about how to cope with rising health costs begins soon. Already we have the situation where Velcade, a new and expensive drug to treat bone marrow cancer, is available in Scotland but not in England and Wales where NICE, the drugs regulator, has decided it is not cost effective. This has caused understandable distress among patient groups. We need a proper public and political debate about the best way forward or we will continue to see controversies like those over Herceptin and Velcade develop in the months and years to come.
At Standard Life Healthcare we do not have the answers to the challenge of expensive new drugs and rising patient expectation but we do believe that it is important that these issues are discussed sooner rather than later. That way the public and private sectors have the best chance to work together to make sure that people have access to the treatment they need, when they need it.
Sources
1) The Guardian, 10 November 2006.
2) Standard Life Healthcare claims experience.
3) Standard Life Healthcare Attitudes to Healthcare Survey 2006.
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